From: RT Published: 16 February, 2011, 13:48 Up to 80 per cent of international help to Afghanistan is being lost in international and local corruption schemes, insists Pino Arlacchi, Italian Member of the European Parliament and the former UN anti-drug and crime chief. When asked about the situation with drugs in Afghanistan and claims that the brother of the president is a well-known drug lord, Arlacchi said "this is a very old story". "When I was in the UN, this guy [Ahmed Wali Karzai -- brother of President Hamid Karzai] was already known as a major [drug] trafficker... of course it is true, but this is just one problem out of many," said Pino Arlacchi. He confirmed that the US diplomatic cables revealed by WikiLeaks paint a disastrous picture of Afghanistan. Officials traveling with millions of dollars of cash and having villas in Dubai is "absolutely true, but just one piece of truth", he said. "Out of the US$40 billion that arrived in Afghanistan for civilian aid, only eight billion went through the Afghan government," he revealed, "the rest is international corruption." Although the Western media keeps on talking about the corruption in the Afghan government, Arlacchi claims the reality is that Afghans are dealing with only about 20 per cent of the money and the scale of international corruption is much higher. The "soft corruption" that devours up to 80 per cent of the money allocated for Afghanistan remains invisible, unlike Afghan ministers with cases stuffed ...